Monday, March 10, 2014

Pedagogy of the Depressed

"Whatever
the
subject of study in the classroom, the
shadow
subject is ourselves, our limits, our
potentials. As long as that

remains in the
shadows, it will block both individual and
group
from full illumination. But if both hurt
and self-doubt can be

brought into the
light…the learning will flower.” Parker Palmer in The
Courage To Teach

Some of the
rigorists-of-higher education might wince at incorporating
“both hurt and self-doubt (brought into the light).” Appropriately: not
appropriate for
the Witherspoon Complex & Young Professionals : to
factor-in hurt & doubt.

Palmer is over
generalizing from a HUMANITIES bias, I’d say; maybe
over compensating for the dominant stereotypical
objectivist/reductionist
/empirical somewhat positivistic instrumentalism of the
“scientific” frame
of mind, which we
Humanities Disciplines & Majors (if not Art) pedagogically
tend to copy and
even emulate: the sound of only one hand clapping, one
culture, one economy: rubricized measure-mentalism.. .

Bring it on, I say: hurt
and self-doubt, confusion,ambiguity, all the mess
and
guess that goes into making sense-of-one’s-own-with
others, all that
goes into the reading of
shared texts, the biases and prejudices that filter
and occlude: the argument that edifies, the trial and error and
room for
play necessary for ecos-social-sustainable practice.

This
conflict is no problem for professionals, appropriately
focusing on
subject- matter, content,
& methodology of disciplinary rigor

(Does
no good to undercut,
question, fool with,
put into play confusing
the issues as
well as measurable outcomes no matter how
far a comfort
zone might be said to be pushed
toward frontiers yet unknown .beyond

the
edge & outside the box: it demoralizes progress
& obscure the
aims, goals and purposes
of disciplinary study.)

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville